We’ve started adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching. […] The experimental results of this change have proven positive — less clicking, more watching. […] As with previous optimizations to our discovery features, this should benefit your channel if your videos drive more viewing time across YouTube.

Well you always write about the keyword “SEO” while giving YouTube examples. How can it help to YouTubers who don’t have any blogs or website (in step 3 – description part)? You could have given examples of YouTubers who are in entertainment industry as well because the people who visit your site are not necessarily webmasters. They could be anyone.
Awesome post! It turns out that one of my videos ranked just by following your instructions on video and description optimization. I didn’t even get around to Vagex! I’m sure that if I can rack up more likes and blast a few links(I don’t need to ATM, it’s pretty high in G anyway), I could do even better. I may just set up a few affiliate link videos(out of my niche) as a side income. Plain awesome, man.
3) Youtube Description - When typing up your description for all of your Youtube videos you have a maximum of 5,000 words so use them effectively and pepper in your keyword in the description along with other related keywords to your Youtube video. For example read this entire description and you will see the "video optimization" strategy that I use to rank this video on the first page of Youtube.
SIDENOTE. The endscreen needs to be baked into your video during the editing process. For our endscreen, both the subscribe circle and “next video” sections are blank. When you add end screen elements, it’ll fill those sections. The subscribe sphere should be 196 x 196 px and the video or playlist rectangle is 410px x 230px. Here’s a free template you can download.
Hey Brian and Alex, the backlinks doesn’t necessarily help your YouTube rankings, but backlinks from other videos and channels are a big part of the YouTube algorithm and Google rankings is a part of YouTube algorithm as well. What really helps is higher PR backlinks and front page Google rankings, that will naturally help your video rank better on YouTube. If you have good rankings on Google, your YouTube rankings also get better. Then the obvious, high retention views is what dominates YouTube search results. Ex. Google search “draas” without quotes, my client video is number 5 on Google and number 1 on YouTube. How? Everybody has more views, likes, favorites and comments. But my video is properly optimized, and my Google presents is evident.
Hey Eddy, my name is Stanford Pelage I am a YouTube and Google seo expert. I’ve made several comments on this thread and I would suggest that you went through the entire comments and look click ctrl f and type mrpelge and read all of my comments, that would drastically help you. The thing about YouTube Google rankings since April 2014 Google had a major update, many vseo have been crying but the solution is pretty simple. Treat your important videos like a website, don’t over optimize and don’t keyword stuff. Everyone says to do long articles, I would recommend a 1,000-1,500 word unique article for YouTube videos with a lot of competition. Don’t spam your video filename, don’t spam the tags. Just 3-5 tags would be sufficient. Main keyword,main keyword with an s and an lsi keyword and what your product does would be perfect, don’t want to confuse Google, that represents spam.
Hey Brian and Alex, the backlinks doesn’t necessarily help your YouTube rankings, but backlinks from other videos and channels are a big part of the YouTube algorithm and Google rankings is a part of YouTube algorithm as well. What really helps is higher PR backlinks and front page Google rankings, that will naturally help your video rank better on YouTube. If you have good rankings on Google, your YouTube rankings also get better. Then the obvious, high retention views is what dominates YouTube search results. Ex. Google search “draas” without quotes, my client video is number 5 on Google and number 1 on YouTube. How? Everybody has more views, likes, favorites and comments. But my video is properly optimized, and my Google presents is evident.

Hey Eddy, my name is Stanford Pelage I am a YouTube and Google seo expert. I’ve made several comments on this thread and I would suggest that you went through the entire comments and look click ctrl f and type mrpelge and read all of my comments, that would drastically help you. The thing about YouTube Google rankings since April 2014 Google had a major update, many vseo have been crying but the solution is pretty simple. Treat your important videos like a website, don’t over optimize and don’t keyword stuff. Everyone says to do long articles, I would recommend a 1,000-1,500 word unique article for YouTube videos with a lot of competition. Don’t spam your video filename, don’t spam the tags. Just 3-5 tags would be sufficient. Main keyword,main keyword with an s and an lsi keyword and what your product does would be perfect, don’t want to confuse Google, that represents spam.

Youtube videos seem top of the search for almost everything now.I get Youtube is a massive cash cow for Google, but a lot of these videos that outrank traditional web pages are rubbish. It’s getting to the point where Google are compromising their own search engine. By the time you’ve scrolled past the ads and the videos, you may as well start on page two.
One thing I’ve been curious about from a video SEO standpoint is captions. Logic tells me that if you upload your own caption file to the video, YouTube would use that to discern what your video is about and use that info in how it ranks your video in the results. I’m running an experiment on one of my YouTube channels right now to see if they have any effect on views over time. We’ll see!
Brian it seems to me that one of the biggest downsides of videos on your site is the load time. So I was checking into lazy load. But then I read that Google doesn’t crawl videos if they are lazy loaded. Do you think lazy loading is a good idea? Basically what’s more important for SEO: speed, or having Google see the extra video content? Or is there another way to make videos faster?
3) Youtube Description - When typing up your description for all of your Youtube videos you have a maximum of 5,000 words so use them effectively and pepper in your keyword in the description along with other related keywords to your Youtube video. For example read this entire description and you will see the "video optimization" strategy that I use to rank this video on the first page of Youtube.
Hi Brian, Thanks for sharing your insights on youtube SEO. I recently had my video go viral (it has gotten almost 145,000 views on YouTube and Twitter within a week). The tipping point seemed to be that it was tweeted out by someone as “The Worst Ad on YouTube.” Strangely this person does not have that many followers but it seemed to pick up a tremendous amount of views very quickly. I was running Adwords and Facebook campaigns, but at a pretty low level. Any insights?
This is another excellent piece of content Brian. I now find myself asking, “What would Brian do?” while creating content/outreach. In this piece though, I cannot wrap my head around your video production only costing $90. Every time I have looked into video production/editing locally, the price has always been $1000+. Perhaps because I live so close to Hollywood LOL.

Unfortunately, high rankings rarely happen by chance. Even the most skilled and knowledgeable marketers struggle with getting the top-ranking spot. So, how can a regular business owner hope to achieve this feat? While there's no way to absolutely guarantee high rankings, this post will look at some strategies anyone can use to seriously increase their chances of claiming that #1 spot.